Tuesday, February 18, 2014

The medium and the message: comics about asylum seekers

This week, two very different Australian comics about asylum seekers have received widespread attention.

The first is At work inside our detention centres: A guard’s story by Melbourne comics artist Sam Wallman.

The story has since been shared on Facebook more than 50,000 times. “At work” documents in the first-person a man’s experiences being hired, trained and then working for Serco, the multinational services company that runs all the immigration detention centres on the Australian mainland.

The comic, designed to be read on-screen, is sparse, monochrome (with two notable exceptions), dominated by white space, unpanelled, and features Wallman’s unmistakeable bendy anatomies.